On this fourth of June, I am on a return flight from Toronto
to Vancouver having been away for five weeks. We have been in Wales and England
honouring my wife Christine as she celebrates her seventy years.
As I fly I am remembering my mother Tina, for whom this day
was a birthday. She lived to celebrate 88 of those birthdays and she has been
away from her family since November 2007.
We miss her still yet time passes quickly enough that the
blurring of memories occurs in spite of our desire to remember. It is
photographic images that arouse the recall.
What an interesting woman Mom was. Born in Saskatchewan in a
farming community, living in Waldheim and Hepburn, she had a grade nine
education and she began to work hard at an early age. She was industrious from
the start, knowing how to sew, how to bake and to cook. She did unskilled work,
clerking and switchboard operator. She married Edward Richard Unruh, but soon
their lives were interrupted by WWII and my father’s enlistment into the Royal
Canadian Air Force. The post war years began with them teaming to start and to
run a Coffee Shop in Hepburn. Soon however, Dad felt that opportunity for
employment and a future existed in Ontario and the family, Dad, me, and a
pregnant Mom moved to St. Catharines ON.
